18 Jul Kings Speech
Yesterday’s Kings Speech highlighted that ‘Ministers will get Britain building, including through planning reform, as they seek to accelerate the delivery of high quality infrastructure and housing.’
The driver for this will be a new Planning and Infrastructure Bill ensuring that the planning system is an enabler of growth and enabling democratic engagement with how, not if, homes and infrastructure are built.
The new Planning and Infrastructure Bill aims to achieve this including by:
- Speeding up and streamlining the planning process to build more homes of all tenures but does not expressly mention the return of mandatory house-building targets;
- Improving local planning decision making by modernising planning committees;
- Increasing local planning authorities’ capacity, to improve performance and decision making, providing a more predictable service to developers and investors through boosting capacity and speeding up decision-making;
- Enabling relevant new and improved national policy statements which provide opportunity to be updated every five years;
- Using development to fund nature recovery where currently both are stalled, unlocking a win-win outcome for the economy and for nature; and
- Further reforming compulsory purchase compensation rules to ensure that compensation paid to landowners is fair but not excessive.
It is important to highlight that the Kings Speech also included an English Devolution Bill which will establish a new framework for English devolution, moving power out of Westminster and back to those who know their areas best including enhanced powers over strategic planning.